Sharps (18 page)

“Actually, it was just carelessness.” He knew straight away that he’d said the wrong thing. Outwitting her with a magnificent ploy was bad enough; making a stupid mistake and then going on to win an overwhelming victory was ten times worse. He had no idea how to recover from that. But she offered him another game, and he made up his mind that this time she was going to win, no matter what.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out. He’d set her up a knight fork that should’ve been mate in three, but ten moves later she gave him a look that felt as though it had flayed half the skin off his face, and resigned. “Another?” he said.

“All right.”

Maybe, he thought wildly, as the inevitable slaughter proceeded, she’s letting
me
win, just to make me suffer. Maybe she’s an absolute genius at the game – not so implausible as it might seem; you’d have to be damned good to lose against the chances he’d been offering – and what she enjoys is the embarrassment and guilt of her opponent. The first imperative of war, his father always insisted, was to define victory; to work out exactly what you wanted to achieve. Depending on what her agenda was, she stood to gain considerably more from losing than winning. His father was, of course, notoriously bad at chess. He always lost when playing against promising junior officers or enemy generals. But of course, in losing, he gained valuable information about their strengths, whereas if he won, all he’d have demonstrated was that he was more clever than them, which he knew already.

After she’d lost, she pulled up the blind and looked out of the window. The sun, he confirmed, was on the other side of the chaise, as he’d suspected.

But Dad
, he heard himself saying,
I’m really not interested in tactics and strategy and the art of war. Don’t be stupid, Addo
. The voice, gentle, contemptuous and kind.
Strategy and tactics are everything. They’re the whole of life. War is just a tiny part of it
. And then, by more or less direct association, his own voice, almost a year ago now, telling her,
I never argue with my father, it’s like arguing with the sea. You remember the story about the man who argued with the sea, Lyssa? You remember what happened to him
? And she’d frowned and said no, and he’d smiled and said,
He got very, very wet
. The last but one time he’d seen her, and she’d called him spineless, and yelled at him because he didn’t disagree.

Everything. Well, he was his father’s son, in that respect at least. He worked out an exit strategy before standing up and closing a door, or offering round a plate of biscuits.

(And always, always in the back of his mind his mother’s voice:
Nobody ever suggested you’re stupid, Addo. It’s just
… And then, for once, her exceptional command of language failed her, and she waved her hands vaguely instead.
We should’ve put you into the priesthood, but your grandfather wouldn’t hear of it
. He reflected on that, not for the first time that day or any day. His father was his father’s son, and so it went on. And back to Lyssa’s voice, saying,
Poor Addo. You inherit so much more than land in the landed bloody aristocracy
.)

At least there was no longer anything stopping him from looking out of the window. He saw moorland, empty, bleak and bizarrely purple (the colour of emperors; in the Eastern Empire, it was treason if a commoner wore purple. A distant ancestor on his mother’s side had died for a faint purple stripe in the weave of an imported scarf. The family was very proud of her, for some reason). Somewhere around here, if he remembered his ancient history, was the tomb of Ataulf the Great. Of course there was no point at all in looking out for it, because it was lost for ever, like so much else, but someone with a proper feel for history ought to feel a slight frisson, passing through the country where the mightiest of all conquerors lay buried. He inspected his soul: no frisson. Oh well.

His mind kept trying to get back to the question he’d asked after the fight with the bandits, which nobody had answered and nobody except him appeared to find interesting: why had the swords in the packing case been sharps instead of foils? Various answers came to mind, and he knew he could make any of them plausible enough to be credible, if he wanted to. He’d been taught how to do that sort of thing, at great expense, by the finest logicians and rhetoricians money could buy in Scheria. They would argue that if something was so believable that you sincerely believed it, and enough people sincerely believed it too, then it must be true. He’d never been able to win that argument (only partly because he was too well brought up to contradict his betters), but he’d never really accepted it. Someone had put sharp weapons in that crate instead of foils, either through negligence or by design, and until he knew the answer to the question, it would be a crime against scientific method to assume, believe or accept anything at all about his current situation. But the others didn’t seem particularly bothered. They seemed happy to jump over it, like the knight on the chessboard.

(If I was a chess piece, he wondered, which piece would I be? Not a king or a queen, naturally. Not a knight, because however hard I try, I can’t jump over anything, or come at problems from right angles. Not fierce and strong enough to be a castle, and no son of the Carnufex could ever be a pawn, so presumably I’m a bishop. Should’ve been, only my grandfather wouldn’t hear of it.)

He realised he was looking straight at Iseutz. Luckily she didn’t seem to have noticed; she was staring out of the window, rapt in contemplation of the heather.
A plain girl
, his mother would say.
Probably prettier than she looks
, would be Stellecho’s verdict, immediately followed by,
Don’t even think about it, little brother. There wouldn’t be enough left of you to bury
. Not that he’d even considered thinking about it. Suidas didn’t like her, or at least they were always bickering, and Suidas said things about her behind her back. Lyssa would’ve noticed him looking at her and smiled, in that way she had that made him wish he’d never been born. Father probably wouldn’t be able to see her, because her father was something in the Bank. The Irrigator had severe difficulty noticing people who weren’t of good family, unless they were soldiers.

She really doesn’t want to be here, he thought. Suidas is here because he needs the money, for Giraut it was this or the rope, and I’m here because I got a direct order from a superior officer. But as far as he knew, she wasn’t governed by that sort of imperative; he assumed she’d been bullied or nagged into it, or maybe she’d actually wanted to go at the time, to get away from home and her family. That was actually quite plausible. Addo wasn’t entirely sure what women actually
did
; in the Carnufex household, it seemed to be mostly needlework, while the Phocas daughters sketched and played suitable musical instruments (not woodwind, because a lady doesn’t puff out her cheeks like a bullfrog). He couldn’t imagine Iseutz doing anything like that.

She’d noticed him. It was too late to break eye contact. She scowled at him, and said, “What?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You were looking at me. What is it?”

Oh well, he thought, why not? “I was just wondering,” he said, “what made you come on this trip.”

She gave him a look of horrified fascination, as though he’d just kissed her or pulled her hair. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “None of my business, of course. I was just curious.”

The gamble paid off. There was a short struggle inside her, and then she relaxed very slightly. “If you must know, I was given a choice, by my father. Well, it wasn’t a choice exactly, more like a threat. Well, a bluff. You see, they wanted to marry me off to some idiot in my father’s department at the Bank. Something political, I’m sure you know the sort of thing. I wasn’t having it. I was so angry. And then my mother chipped in with
Well, dear, you do realise you’re not getting any younger, and most girls your age
and all that, and I just lost my temper with both of them. And my father said,
So what do you intend doing with your life, if you’re not going to get married
? And all I could think of was fencing, because I was ladies’ junior champion when I was sixteen; and Mother just laughed, but Father got this look on his face and said about how they were sending a team to Permia, and some important people had been to see him to ask if I could go, but he’d said no, because I was just about to get married. So I said,
Fine, then, I’ll go to stupid Permia
. And after that, well, I couldn’t really back down. It’d have meant marrying this clown of Father’s, and that’d have been my life down the sink. And I thought, well, how bad can it be? Compared to marrying a moron, I mean. So here I am.”

Addo nodded slowly. “Do you like fencing?”

“Yes, actually. At least, I like it when I win. How about you?”

He frowned. It wasn’t a question he’d ever been asked, or expected ever to have to answer. It was a bit like
Do you enjoy breathing
? “Yes,” he replied, surprising himself slightly. “I enjoy it the same way I like chess.”

“You like winning.”

He shook his head very slightly. “When you’re fencing, you’ve got to concentrate, you can’t let yourself think about anything else. You’ve got to be alone in your mind. I think that’s what I like about it.”

She frowned, as though she hadn’t entirely understood him but was nevertheless intrigued by what he’d said. He felt strangely pleased by that. “Me too,” she said. “Also, I like being able to jab at people as hard as possible and not get into trouble for it later.”

He nodded sagely. “You should try longsword,” he said. “You’d like that.”

“Not allowed. Not ladylike.”

“That’s a shame. You’d be good at it.”

The moment that followed was of a sort he recognised: the disengage, after a well-fought point of attack, riposte, counter, bind, simultaneous withdrawal to long measure. It was a moment when, generally speaking, you felt respect and a kind of warmth for your opponent, a special luxury of fighting with foils. Usually it was followed by a long pause, as each participant tried to tempt the other into making the next attack, because it was when attacking that you were most vulnerable. His father said that people communicated most when they fought.

(
You know what
, she’d said to him once.
Your father doesn’t actually know everything about everything
.

True
, he’d replied.
He knows very little about embroidery
.)

“Your father’s General Carnufex.”

Yes, I know that. “Yes.”

She gave him a solemn look. “My brother Hamo was in your father’s regiment in the War,” she said. “He joined at fifteen, worked his way up to first lieutenant in the light cavalry. Then your father sent his squadron to capture a bridge. But he didn’t really want the bridge, it was just a diversion. Like you sacrificing your queen, in the chess game.”

Addo knew what was coming. Another dead brother, for whose death he was responsible by birth and inheritance. The only decision left to him was whether to play his own dead brother, or to retreat behind his guard.

“He was lucky,” she went on, and Addo caught his breath. “They took the stupid bridge and chased away the enemy, and then they just sat there waiting for the rest of the army to catch them up. But nobody came. He said he felt such a fool, like he’d been stood up by a girl, and his men were looking at him. He started thinking that maybe he’d captured the wrong bridge. Well, they waited till it was starting to get dark, and Hamo really didn’t want to be out there at night, away from the rest of the army, where the Aram Chantat could creep up on them, or anything. So he led his squadron back to camp, and everybody was really surprised to see them. They assumed they’d be dead. But it turned out your dad had screwed up, and the enemy didn’t take the bait. They didn’t send their mobile reserve or whatever it’s called to try and protect the bridge, so when your dad launched his main attack, he got a really nasty shock.”

Addo nodded. “Did they win?”

“I suppose so. Or if they didn’t win that day, they won later on.”

“And your brother was all right? He survived the war.”

“Oh yes. He’s always been lucky, Hamo. He’s married to a very distant poor relation of a junior branch of the Phocas, so you can see, he’s really made something of himself.”

Addo grinned. “Unlike you,” he said.

“Quite. What about you? Shouldn’t you have been married off by now?”

“I’m my father’s mobile reserve,” Addo replied. “That’s not strictly true, I’m more his defence in depth. He’s keeping me for an emergency, where he needs to make a marriage alliance quickly. Always keep a reserve, he says.”

“So.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “No emergency yet, then.”

“None he hasn’t been able to cover without committing his heavy cavalry.” He took a breath, and said, “I thought you were going to say my father got your brother killed. I hear that quite often.”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose you do.” She shrugged. “Hamo was sure he was going to get court-martialled and hanged for abandoning his position, but nobody ever mentioned it again. He couldn’t stay there, though. He said he owed it to his men to get them back safe.”

“He was a good officer,” Addo replied. “He did the right thing.”

“But it was all pointless. The trick didn’t work.”

“That wasn’t his fault. And he used his head, and probably saved a squadron of cavalry. I’m sure my father approved of what he did. In fact, I know for certain. Your brother would’ve heard about it if my father wasn’t pleased.”

She clicked her tongue. “It’d be far better for everyone if people stuck to chess,” she said.

“My father’s a rotten chess player.”

She grinned at that. “Worse than me?”

“You’d slaughter him.”

She laughed – not an attractive sound in itself, but it gave Addo more pleasure than a clean and acknowledged hit – and Giraut woke up. He blinked and said, “What’s the matter?”